


in the grand days of great men and the smallest of gestures

by Cinnamonbookworm (orphan_account)



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: A Proposal, F/M, oliver queen has heart eyes and i die, porsches and sunsets, speculation for the ending of 3x23
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-10
Updated: 2015-05-10
Packaged: 2018-03-29 20:40:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3909901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Cinnamonbookworm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>happiness is a language that is foreign to both of them, but, in the light of the setting sun, it doesn't seem such an impossible idea to learn to speak it together<br/>{title from all this and heaven too by florence + the machine}</p>
            </blockquote>





	in the grand days of great men and the smallest of gestures

**Author's Note:**

> so in other news i can't write proposal fics without dying, also, i don't think i ever jumped off the olicity wedding train so choo choo. i would recommend listening to all this and heaven too by florence + the machine when reading this because it is totally the song that would be playing in the background of these scenes so yeah.

Felicity leans up against her new car with a smile on her face and her heart beating fast. She knows she shouldn’t be nervous, she has no reason to be, but it’s really the first time they’ve seen each other outside of a crisis in so long, and, especially while staring at the company - _her company_ \- that they’d walked out of together the day before everything went to shit. All she can think about is that summer, the one where, looking back, everything seems to be clouded in a hazy mist of happiness and sexual tension.

Happiness. Wow. She hasn’t felt that pure unadulterated feeling in a while. She’s had glimpses, of course - small moments in Nanda Parbat, a _thank you_ uttered deep within the walls of the now broken and battered foundry, getting coffee with Barry in Central City - but nothing, nothing compares to what she sees him turn the corner and set his eyes on her, a smile settling into his face.

She doesn’t see it at first because she’s anxiously smoothing down the skirt of her red and white skater dress - a nervous tick she’d adopted as the number of skirts and dresses in her wardrobe grew - but when she does an all-consuming kind of numbness fills her. And the happiness threatens to consume her. It almost kind of _hurts_. She’s so happy it _hurts_. And that’s before they even say hello.

“Hi.” He says, and he smiles like he’s swallowed the sun and can’t help but let it’s light shine out. Oliver is practically glowing, and she doesn’t think she’s ever seen him this happy. The idea that she could be the cause of it, that his smile only grew this wide because he saw her sends butterflies into her stomach. She feels like she’s a freshman in high school going on her first date and it’s ridiculous, because she’s been through too much with him to feel this way, but she does nevertheless.

“Hi.” She responds, because she can’t think of anything else to say.

“I like the car.” Oliver tells her, and wow this really feels like a first date now because it’s all smalltalk and her wondering whether or not she should kiss him. “It’s a Porsche, right?”

The question hangs unspoken in the air about how she got it, because her job as VP pays a lot but not enough for her to realistically own a Porsche, and he knows she’s too money-savvy to take out a loan for this thing, so she figures it might be a good time to bring up the fact that she now owns the company that used-to-be-his-but-wasn’t-for-a-while-and-now-is-hers.

Felicity nods. “I figured a promotion was worth celebrating, and what better way to celebrate than to get a new car. Especially since you ruined my last one with your blood, but I know that wasn’t really your fault, obviously.”

“Promotion?” He asks, tilting his head to the side a bit like he’s a dog, and it’s such a shift from the Al-Sahim facade that she’s gotten used to over the past few days that it makes the whole conversation seem even more surreal.

“Well, I mean, if it can really be considered a promotion when your boss asks you to sign papers and you don’t really look at them so you don’t know until after you’ve been drugged and attacked and fought your way through a super-virus only to find your boss packing his bags because he’s apparently _leaving_ because he signed the company over to you when you weren’t paying attention.” She’s rambling quickly, letting the words spill out out of her control, and her hands are only shaking a little bit, because she’s worried what his reaction to finding out she now owns his family’s company will be.

“Ray’s leaving?” is the first thing he says in response to her, and she huffs out a little laugh, because _of course_ that’s the first thing he payed attention to, and then his mind seems to catch up to the rest of her story and he asks a different question. “ _You’re_ the CEO now?”

“Yes, well, officially yes, but I haven’t actually started the job yet and I wanted to tell you before anything happened just in case you weren’t okay with it, although why you wouldn’t be okay with it I have no idea because I kept saying I’d help get your company back and I know I didn’t mean it this way but I hope it’s okay anyway and…”

He cuts her off with a kiss; something she’s kind of always wanted him to do forever, because it’s a wonderful way to shut her up before she says something she’ll regret, and it’s not a chaste kiss either, he kind of pounces on her, cupping the back of her head with his hand and leaning his other one on the side of the Porsche that she’s been leaning against. She responds eagerly, opening her mouth when he runs his tongue against her lips and running her hands through the hair that’s grown out a bit in his time away from the League of Assassins. It’s only when she begins to run out of breath that she pulls away.

“So I take it you’re not mad?” Felicity asks, even though he’s obviously not, judging by both the somehow wider smile on his face and the way he just kissed her.

“ _Felicity._ ” Is all he can say in response, and she gets even more breathless by the way he says her name, like she’s just given him the world and he can’t figure out how to express how much she means to him, like her names is a promise he intends to keep. And then “Why would I ever get mad about this? This is - this is…”

“Kind of perfect.” She supplies, because it is, and then she gestures towards the car. “You wanna take it for a spin?”

 

It’s not until they’re halfway up the coast that Felicity notices Oliver’s leg is shaking up and down a bit, and she realizes she might not be the only one who’s a bit nervous about this whole thing, and she’s not really sure why either of them are, but maybe it’s because they’ve put off being happy together for so long that now it seems like something impossible is going to shatter everything and ruin it again.

Or maybe it’s something else.

Oliver pulls over when they get to a section of the road with a view of the setting sun on the ocean; a spot usually reserved for tourists and filled with telescopes for better viewing. She asks him why and he answers with an especially vague “Just want to watch the sunset.”

They get out of the car, and Felicity’s a little cold, but she didn’t bring a coat so he drapes his leather jacket around her and she knows it’s so cliche, but they deserve some happy cutesty cliches after all the terrors they’ve been through. She leans against his chest and they start to watch the sunset together as he presses small kisses to the top of her head, and she’s never been more glad of the height difference between them. And that’s when the something else happens.

He moves away from her, and then grabs her hands in his, and holds them like they’re something delicate and breakable even though they both know that she can destroy worlds with those hands - and has - and then he starts to speak.

“When I was in Nanda Parbat, and Ra’s was forcing me to marry Nyssa,” Oliver begins, and Felicity flinches a bit at the painful memory but swallows it down and keeps looking into his eyes that are the color of the ocean in the setting sun, because he’s going somewhere with this, and he wouldn’t bring it up if he wasn’t. “She was walking down the aisle and I just kept thinking about how you were passed out in that cell thinking I had killed you, all of you. And then all I could think about was how this wasn’t the wedding I’d ever pictured. How the way - the only way  I could ever picture getting married - is if you were the one walking down the aisle.”

Her breath catches in her chest and she thinks she can’t be understanding him correctly, that this is just some crazy dream that she’s going to wake up from any moment - to be fair, she has had a few that go this way - and she absolutely cannot believe it. Because she feels the way she felt when she first discovered her feelings for him; like she’s just this lowly IT girl and he’s the billionaire CEO who could never love her back because that would be unthinkable, but oh look at them now, with her being the billionaire CEO and him being hopelessly in love with her, at least, that’s the way she feels when he looks at her like this.

And then he gets down on one knee and she thinks she might faint.

“Felicity Smoak,”  he whispers, and she can’t stop the hand flying to her mouth. “You have come into my life and swept me up in a tornado of conscious and bright colors and rambles and I could not love you more for it. You make me a better person and I do not deserve you in the least. Even so, how would you feel about making my dream a reality?”

Felicity has never been the type of girl to dream about marriage. Or a fairytale wedding. Or anything like that, even during the royal marriage, which really should be impossible. Her parents’ marriage had scarred her too much for anything like that to ever be on her wishlist, or even her bucket list. But now, now with the sun just on the cusp of the horizon and the overwhelming amount of love in his eyes, she doesn’t think she’s ever wanted anything more.

She’s nodding her head and crying before she can even think rationally about the decision, and even if she did think rationally, she probably would still make the same decision, because she loves him, _god_ she loves him so much, and she cannot picture walking down the aisle to anyone else.

Maybe she caught the bouquet for a reason.

And then she kisses him, and she can feel his smile beneath her lips, and then he’s slipping the ring on her finger and when she looks down she realizes it’s made out of arrowheads, just like baby Sara’s necklace.

“This was kind of spur-of-the-moment.” He offers in explanation. “So I didn’t have time to get anything out of what’s left of the vault but I promise we can go there whenever you want and pick out something better…”

This time, she’s the one to cut him off with a kiss, and she can’t imagine any piece of the Queen jewelry archives that would be worth more to her than this beautiful silver band he’s created by hand. “Perfect. It’s absolutely perfect. I don’t want anything better.”

She smiles against his face again, and he pulls her closer, his hands covering almost her entire back, and he does that tongue thing he did in Nanda Parbat and it sends shivers down her spine and makes her roll her hips against him.

“Okay,” she finally manages when it’s clear they need to move somewhere a bit more private. “Let’s go home.”

And they do.


End file.
